Volume 8: A Trip to the Sick Village Chapter 352: Blending in
Ke Lan turned his head and glanced at the cargo boxes behind him. Although there were no labels on the boxes, he had already seen the cargo list before boarding the transport ship... More than 90% of the cargo in these boxes were "protein blocks" made from cockroaches. In addition, there were several old water recycling treatment equipment and a batch of medicines.
This batch of drugs was also not used to treat radiation sickness. Most of them were nutritional supplements with extremely low production costs, used to replace some vitamins and minerals that could not be obtained from protein blocks. The rest were all painkillers and sedatives.
These goods were raised by several different mining companies, as were the miners suffering from radiation sickness - they came from 11 mining companies under five consortiums, and these mining companies all belonged to the "Alpha Star Mineral Development Alliance."
The "Alpha Star Mineral Development Alliance" was established thirty years ago. Its main purpose is to deal with the aftermath of the miners suffering from radiation sickness. Every once in a while, the companies in the alliance will gather the sick miners and send the supplies to the "sick village". This time, it happened to be the Mitsui Group's turn to be responsible for transporting people and supplies.
The "Alpha Star Mineral Development Alliance " announced that out of humanitarian spirit, they had built a complete sanatorium on the "South Area 16" space station, so that every miner who unfortunately fell ill could be properly treated... To this end, they even filmed a so-called "documentary" to depict the comfortable life of these sick miners in the sanatorium... Of course, this documentary was not filmed on the space station at all, and those so-called sick miners were just actors hired by the development alliance.
As for what the real "sick village" is like, no one knows at all - even the captain of the transport ship will only stay briefly in the unloading area of the space station and will never go deep into it.
All exploration records have been sealed, and those without sufficient authority have difficulty accessing them. As for the media, they have all been issued gag orders, strictly prohibited from reporting any news related to the South Sixteenth District.
The Mineral Development Alliance alone cannot achieve this level of power. This only means that the Ark officials have acquiesced to this matter.
After all, in a high-radiation mining area, a fully automatic mining robot worth millions of credits would hardly last more than two hundred hours. It takes a lot of precious resources to build such a robot, but the minerals it mines during its short working life are simply not enough to offset its own wear and tear and depreciation rate...
A miner who only needs to be paid a few thousand credit points a month can work for at least two to three months before his health has problems.
To feed a miner, no energy crystals are needed, nor are silicon chips and precision circuit boards that are easily scrapped in high-radiation environments. All that is needed is protein blocks and water, plus a bed for people to lie down and sleep.
For the ruling class of the Ark, population is also a resource, and a very cost-effective resource at that.
From the perspective of mining companies, not to mention efficiency, manual mining is obviously much cheaper than using fully automatic equipment... Moreover, they will never worry about not being able to recruit enough miners. Although a monthly salary of several thousand credit points is not very high, it is still very tempting for people at the bottom of society - the salary level of factories and service industries on the Ark is not even half of that of miners. For those who have no background and capital, and no ability or special skills, becoming a miner may be the fastest way to make money.
“Anyway, I have protective clothing and anti-radiation drugs, and I’ll only work for a month or two before leaving. I shouldn’t be so unlucky as to get radiation sickness…” Many people think this way when filling out application forms.
According to the data provided by the Mitsui Group, the ratio of lucky people to unlucky people is about three to one, which means that only one out of every four people will suffer from radiation sickness... Compared with the mortality rate of relic hunters, miners are already a low-risk occupation.
Few people who sign up to mine would think about what the outcome would be if they become one of the one quarter of unlucky people.
The standard treatment for radiation sickness on the Ark currently costs 90,000 credit points for one course of treatment, which is roughly equivalent to three years' salary for them. And none of these miners can work in the mines for three years...
Ke Lan suddenly remembered a sentence: When it comes to probability, if it’s not your turn, then the probability is zero, but if it is your turn, then it’s 100%.
Except for the two of them, the people in the cargo hold were all poor souls with a 100% chance of survival.
A slight vibration came from around the cabin, and Ke Lan knew that the transport ship had left the port and started heading towards the "sick village" floating in low-Earth orbit.
The unusual movement of the transport ship caused a brief commotion among the miners, but it soon subsided... Radiation sickness had drained their physical strength. For these people, even talking was a very strenuous task, let alone moving their positions.
Many people were lying on the ground in a mess, their skinny bodies shaking along with the floor of the cargo hold.
One of the miners began to vomit, but he had no strength to get up from the ground, and the vomit that poured out of his throat flowed back into his trachea - his body began to twitch, his feet kicked slightly, his face gradually began to turn purple, and his eyeballs bulged out of their sockets as if they were about to roll out of them... After about two or three minutes, he stopped struggling, and the hands that were pinching his throat loosened and slid to both sides of his body.
His chest stopped rising and falling, his pupils began to dilate, and he was dead.
The sitting miners looked at him with indifference and dull expressions on their faces. In the past two or three minutes, no one was willing to step forward to help him... They seemed to have become numb to death, or perhaps, they were simply unwilling to waste their energy on strangers.
Ke Lan did not move either. It was not because he was as cold-blooded as the other miners, but because he noticed that two of the miners had a familiar pattern tattooed on their bodies... The last time Ke Lan saw this pattern was on the body of the "missionary" who kept pestering him.
These two miners are members of a heretical sect!
Moreover...their status in the sect might be extraordinary!
As far as Ke Lan knew, ordinary believers of heretical sects would not tattoo such emblems on their bodies. At least, the people from the Arasaka Group and the exiles who entered the bottomless pit did not have such emblems on their bodies .
